When You’re A Good Employee But Your Boss Is A Terrible And Abusive Person

Before we get into this, I just want to say that if you are a shitty employee, this piece isn’t meant for you. I’m not out here trying to enable anyone. If you show up late constantly, don’t do the work you’re supposed to do, and force everyone around you to pick up your slack, your boss has a right to come down on you like a breeze block of pain.

Your coworkers also probably hate you, even though they won’t tell you to your face. When you thank that one co-worker for covering for you for the 8th time that week, they really want to stab you. Someone should yell at you.

Is Your Boss A Total Dick?

I’m not talking about bosses who are justifiably angry at truly bad employees. This is about bosses who are impossible to predict, impossible to please, cheat you out of pay, set you up to fail, and then punish you for failing. They look for opportunities to humiliate and debase everyone around them and pull horrifying shit regularly.

“In a lot of ways, Donald Trump might represent the revenge a lot of older people want to take on us.”

Maybe they do things like this

-They stare at you like the last prime cut in a meat case.

-Every Friday they make you go through a whole day of intermittent begging before they hand you your check.

-One Friday, they keep putting off paying you, in an attempt to force you to come to their home that night, to get the money you earned.

That’s just one boss I had… My first ever office job… I was 20 years old.

If you’ve ever worked for someone else, you’ve probably come across some insane shit. I’ve had way more terrible bosses than fair or competent ones, and that’s not uncommon. Half of my friends have jobs where they deal with the kind of shit that women in Lifetime movies deal with. Some of them are so used to it, it’s almost a casual point of conversation.

“So, how are you, Danny?”

“Oh, you know. The usual. I think my boss is on some new prescription meds again. He screamed at us for 20 minutes. I think some of it was racist, but I’m not really sure. After that, he spent the rest of the day in his office asleep, which was nice. I think I feel like spaghetti for dinner. What’s new with you?”

But Of Course, It’s Young People That Are The Problem In The Workplace

Every day on Facebook, I see at least one or two articles bopping around about how much Millennials suck in the workplace. We’re so needy. We’re so gay with our feelings, and whatever. Having to work with us is horrible because we want hand holding at scheduled intervals. Are we even really American? Where have the good old days of polio gone? What happened to women wearing bras that make it look like they’ve stuffed a pair of waffle cones down their sweaters? What happened to the American dream?

While I’m getting mad petty, I think the ‘Are we even really American?’ thing is possibly at the crux of all this intergenerational animosity. There’s a definite split between what older generations value and what Millennials value (in general). This plays a huge part as to why we hate our bosses, and why they also hate us.

It’s Broke And They Don’t Want You To Fix It

While a lot of clickbait writers seem to think weak millennials are single-handedly destroying the world, we aren’t the ones choosing to lay down oil pipelines left and right that squirt like grim reaping pornstars. We aren’t the ones who decided to casually use slave labor to create a bunch of iPhones that split down the middle if you look at them funny. However, we’re an easy scapegoat for people who are being forced to confront that the reward systems they’ve clung to, rarely reward.

Imagine you’ve been told your whole life, if you perform in a certain way, you will be happy and successful, and eventually the guy on top. Decades later, you aren’t all or any of these things, and you don’t know how to do anything else. Then, a bunch of stroppy kids are telling you your value system, like, sucks.

Not all ideas of American success are the same. Not all of our individual ideas of success are the same. I’m not here trying to tell you that every person over 35 in America feels the same exact way. However, you can’t deny that there are some fucked up precedents in our society, and if you don’t think critically about what you’re doing, they’ll fucking gitcha.

A lot of our parents and grandparents got all kinds of got.

This Is Where Shit Gets Dark

One of those deeply ingrained societal evils is the idea that if you’re rich or in a position of power, it’s because you innately deserve it. And if you’re poor, it’s because you deserve to suffer, so ergo, people at the top are just inherently better. There’s this idea that a person can attain an almost godlike unimpeachable status simply by getting to the top.

If you think that’s not real, I’d like you to consider our current President, Donald Trump.

Yeah, I know. It hurts. I’m sorry for bringing it up.

Despite the fact he’s an unstable sexual predator who has more wrestling experience than political experience, people energetically pushed Trump into office. They gleefully worked against their own interests. They made sure a man whose restaurants fuck up salad orders is running a branch of our government.

If you’re wondering how the fuck anyone could do that, the answer probably has a lot to do with what success and wealth means subtextually in our culture. Even though Trump was handed his wealth by his dad, and many of his business ventures are well known failures, the mask of wealth, success, and power is enough for those who dream of being in his position to believe that he is deserving.

Many people want to believe that one day, if they only work hard enough, they too will earn the right to act as if they are wholly above others. They believe you have the wealth and prestige you deserve. When we, as young people, insist that they do not have the right to act insane because of their money or status, we aren’t just questioning their behavior. No, what we are questioning is an entire implied system of reward. The inky tendrils of this terrible mindset reach far into the collective thought processes of our culture. Some people have dedicated their lives to upholding it, without even thinking about it.

If you asked most people if they think having a lot of money or a cushy position means that someone is inherently superior, they would say no. If you asked them if they think somebody in a position of wealth or power has earned the right to treat other people as if they are subhuman, they would again, say no. Said outright, it sounds dumb. And weird. And vaguely Nazi-ish.

They Call It Social Darwinism

I didn’t invent Social Darwinism. Some legit believe that if people have wealth or power, it’s because they deserve it, and might even be genetically superior. The fact that a bunch of people looked at the work of Darwin, someone who hated slavery and thought empathy should inform social policy, and who just wanted to explore how animals change over time, and then took his work, and went full Nazi with it, honestly keeps me up at night.

In a lot of ways, Donald Trump might represent the revenge a lot of older people want to take on us. Not because all of us reject their system of reward and prestige, because let’s face it, not all of us have, but because they know in a lot of ways their cultural ideas of what success means, are quickly becoming obsolete.

The nuclear family, enforced heterosexual monogamy, what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, the American Dream, who deserves what, and a whole mess of rules that people have clung dearly to, even as they ate them alive, are in the process of massive collapse, or transformation.

Lamest Revenge Ever

Let’s face it, unless Trump really does manage to end the world, he will come to represent why subscribing to bad, old school ideas, doesn’t work in the modern world. What we value is changing. The ‘coffee’s for closers’ bullshit, where you scream, and hem and haw ,and step on everybody because you’ve earned it, is going out of style. Being a jerk isn’t cool anymore.

Hypermasculinity is working its way out of the workplace. It doesn’t get you respect. It’s not a badge of honor to make your underlings terrified of you. Most people just hate you, mock you mercilessly behind your back, and put up with it until they can get a job far away from you. The days of the gun wielding CEO who can threaten his employees without consequence, because he has some kind of divine business right, are going out kicking and screaming.

So, maybe you are a shitty employee.

But maybe your boss has been taught they’ve earned the right to abuse others, and they wield that imagined right like it’s carte blanche for being terrible to you. Maybe they also hate that you’re not buying it.

Isadora Teich is a freelance writer and traveler. They’ve written social media copy, tabloids, news, erotica, opinion pieces, quizzes, have worked on film scripts, and do some ghostwriting from time to time. Isadora lives for artistic experimentation and is working on a novel.